The Green Book

It was the only thing he left to me
Father, O, of mine,
That book of our small blunders
All marked with those red lines.
 
It said:
“We could have had that living space
If only we’d manoeuvred high,
If the people hadn’t betrayed us,
Understood that might was right.
 
Black soil melts through my fingers,
Butter we deserved to till,
To know one’s dreams but never taste them
Is an injustice to the will.”
 
“Ola!” squawks the parrot,
A reminder a thousand times,
The black soil, it eluded us,
Spat us out to distant climes.
 
Concerning a book that my grandfather - a Nazi and SS man with ambitions in Ukraine whose life ended in hiding in Latin America - left to his son about the reasons their efforts to overtake the region failed.